you've got bone shrapnel in your hair, dear
by smileyfacebabe
Summary: Lydia contemplates the state of Stiles' heart and wishes with all of her might that it didn't belong to the most reckless moron she's ever met. Stiles recites poetry, but it doesn't change her mind. She doesn't know which way to look anymore or how to make it stop. Sterek.


Author's Note: Nothing about this is light hearted or amusing. Seriously, nothing. I just bought Richard Siken's book _Crush_ for my poetry class this semester and all of his poems are gorgeous but also heart wrenching and at least two of them remind me of Sterek. The poem Stiles recites is _Wishbone_ and the first time I read it I felt like I was drowning. I also fell off the couch and whined a lot, because this screamed _Stiles loves Derek_ to me. Enjoy.

Disclaimer: I don't own Richard Siken's _Wishbone_. I wish I was that brilliant, but I'm not. Here's this, though.

* * *

Lydia watches Stiles break apart a little flake at a time. It's not an enjoyable thing to watch, but she does it anyway, helpless to stop. She doesn't know who she wants to stop; herself from watching or Stiles from breaking. She'd like to think she wants to stop Stiles from breaking, but she's not stupid, she knows her own limits. She'd tear her eyes away at the first opportunity and leave him to his misery if she could, but she finds herself one of his closest friends. Scott has his own problems to deal with, Stiles says when she brings up the bags under his eyes, the lines around his mouth, the way he doesn't sleep or eat right anymore, the way he doesn't _talk_ to anyone but her anymore.

"Lydia," Stile snaps, when she brings it up. It's been a long day, with two papers due and a math test taken in a flurry of breathless curses, and while she doesn't blame him she's tired of the way he dismisses his own downward spiral. "Leave it alone."

"Why is it that _every time_ I become concerned with your wellbeing you _snap at me_ like a cornered beast," she shrieks. Stiles' jaw clenches and her stomach rolls, but he sighs, deflating like a child's squished dreams. "Sorry," she said, reflexive and quiet.

"We're all sorry," Stiles replies, flippant and cold. He melts a second later and wraps an arm around her shoulders, pressing their bodies together. He feels warm, but she can remember the cold feeling that had clung to his skin after he climbed out of the tub of water in Deaton's clinic and she shivers. He leans his head on top of her own, lips against her temple, and whispers, "I'm sorry too, though. I'm just-"

"Tired?" She interjects softly.

"Exhausted," he laughs darkly.

Things only get worse when Derek comes back into town. The born werewolf throws himself into the chaos that Beacon Hills attracts with his usual reckless fervor and Stiles throws himself into keeping the man alive with an equal level of recklessness. Lydia watches with more distaste then ever as the werewolf carts the only person around who truly understands what it feels like to be human and desperately scared and _helpless_ in this god awful town, endangering his life again and again without even a second thought. She hates Derek, more than a little bit, at the way he makes the lines around Stiles' mouth tighter, the way the teenager's shoulders hunch, defensive and stressed.

"Stop it," she tells Stiles once. His phone is ringing, Derek's name flashing around the screen. Stiles is reaching for it, fingers just curling around the device when she speaks. She's sitting crossed legged on his bed, despite it being two am. They both have books in their laps, the forgotten drafts of their English papers discarded on the floor.

Stiles doesn't stop to ask her what she's talking about. "I can't," he says. He answers the phone. Lydia hates him a little bit too, for being so weak. When he hangs up, after Derek barks a series of words at him that Lydia can't hear, he doesn't turn to look at her. He slips his socked feet into his shoes without turning around while she boils with rage, a sick trapped feeling bubbling in her stomach that makes her fit to burst.

"Why," she finally snaps. It's her turn to get angry, she decides. "Why can't you, Stiles? Why is stopping this _so hard_?"

"I don't _know_," Stiles says, whirling on his heel to face her. His chest heaves, his shoulder twitch, his eyes shine in the moonlight from the open window. He's more terrifying than any monster they've faced, because he's a broken, shattered, feral thing who knows how to claw its way back and pretend to function and that's far more dangerous than any werewolf or darach or boogie man under the bed. One day he's going to snap, she realizes as he storms from the room; Stiles is going to snap and she's not sure who he will kill, someone else or himself.

When he returns the sky is lightening and he's crawling through his own bedroom window like a common criminal. It's a trick he learned from Derek, she knows. She could have left, but she hadn't, choosing instead to curl up under his covers and wait for him. He sheds his clothes, wincing audibly when he pulls off his shirt, and in the pre-dawn glow she can see the bruising blooming on his left shoulder. He crawls under the covers, curls around her, and she feels like crying.

"Do you still want to know why," he asks, curling his arm around her waist. She rolls into him, nodding silently, and he nods back, so solemn it scares her.

"_You saved my life_ he says. _I owe you, I owe you everything_. You don't, I say, you don't owe me squat, let's just get going, let's just get gone, but he's relentless, keeps saying _I owe you_, says _your shoes are filling with your own damn blood, you must want something, just tell me, and it's yours._ But I can't look at him, can hardly speak: I took a bullet for all the wrong reasons, I'd just as soon kill you myself, I say." Stiles' voice cracks and Lydia buries her head in his neck, not caring if she's jarring his shoulder. He continues, reciting the words, voice thick and throat dry. They scratch him on the way out, she imagines.

"You keep saying _I owe you, I owe…_ but you say the same thing every time. Let's not talk about it, let's just not talk. Not because I don't believe it, not because I don't want it any different, but I'm always saving and you're always owing and I'm tired of asking to settle the debt. Don't bother. You never mean it anyway, not really, and it only makes me that much more ashamed. There's only one thing I want, don't make me say it, just get me bandages, I'm bleeding, I'm not just making conversation. There's smashed glass glittering everywhere like stars. It's a Western, Der-_Henry._ It's a downright shoot-em-up. We've made a graveyard out of the bone white afternoon.

"It's another wrong-man-dies scenario, and we keep doing it, Henry, keeping saying _until we get it right_… but we always win and we never quit. See, we've won again, here we are at the place where I get to beg for it, where I get to say _Please, for just one night, will you lie down next to me, we can leave our clothes on, we can stay all buttoned up…_"

Lydia flinches and Stiles' breath hitches, like it had when he was having a panic attack. She clutches him and he clutches her and she wishes for the first time that he loved her. She wishes he would stop reciting this stupid poem, but he doesn't, he barrels on, voice breathy and wavering like it hurts.

Oh god, does it hurt.

"But we both know how it goes," he continues, "I say _I want you inside me_ and you hold my head underwater, I say _I want you inside me_ and you split me open with a knife." He swallows, thickly, and pauses for the longest of seconds and she hopes that it's over, that the poem is done. But then he speaks again and there is twice as much feeling in his voice now and she loses her breath all in one go.

"I'm battling monsters, I'm pulling you out of burning buildings and you say _I'll give you anything_ but you never come through. Even when you're standing up you look like you're lying down, but will you let me kiss your neck, baby? Do I have to tie your arms down? Do I have to stick my tongue down your throat like the hand of a thief, like a burglary, like it's just another petty theft? It makes me tired, Henry. Do you see what I mean? Do you see what I'm getting at?"

Lydia starts crying, pressing her nose against his skin to stifle her sniffles. Stiles' voice tapers off, but she's invested now, she needs to hear him end this. She figures he needs to hear it end too. She makes a _go on_ noise in the back of her throat and he combs his fingers through her hair.

"I swear," he whispers into her ear like a secret, "I end up feeling empty, like you've taken something out of me, and I have to search my body for the scars, thinking _Did he find that one last tender place to sink his teeth in?_ I know you want me to say it, Henry, it's in the script, you want me to say _Lie down on the bed, you're all I ever wanted and worth dying for, too…_ but I think I'd rather keep the bullet." His voice rises in strength, the passion of the words stealing away his weary nature. It's like watching a work of art in motion, if works of art were meant to shatter your heart. Lydia thinks they are, though.

"It's mine, see, I'm not giving it up," Stiles insists. "This way you still owe me, and that's as good as anything. You can't get out of this one, Henry, you can't get it out of me, and with this bullet lodged in my chest, covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because I'm hungry and hollow and just want something to call my own. I'll be your slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue and final resting, walking around with this bullet inside me like the bullet was already there, like it's been waiting inside me the whole time. Do you want it? Do you want anything I have? Will you throw me to the ground like you mean it, reach inside and wrestle it out with your bare hands? If- If…"

He falters for the first time, really falters like he's forgotten the words, but Lydia knows he hasn't. She's finally able to place the poem and it's one he's been thumbing through since he found it, returning to it every few hours like a cutter might be to their scars, their bandages.

"Stiles," she says, but he expels his breath, angry and quick, and continues.

"If you love me, Henry, you don't love me in a way I understand. Do you know how it ends? Do you feel lucky? Do you want to go home now? There's a bottle of whiskey in the trunk of the Chevy and a dead man at our feet staring up at us like we're something interesting. This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard, and make a wish."

Lydia presses her body as tightly as she can against Stiles and wishes with all her might that they were anywhere but Beacon Hills. She opens her mouth to suggest running, for who needs a Fields Medal if it will cost them their _lives_ and she's tired of watching people die, but Stiles sighs and cards his fingers through her hair.

"Go to sleep," he tells her. She does. He drools on her shoulder, but she doesn't hold it against him. At least he's sleeping, she thinks.

The next week a bullet meant for Derek glances instead off of Stiles' arm. She clutches Stiles' other arm while Ms. McCall cleans his wound, Derek standing across from them in the Stilinski's kitchen.

"I want to go home now," she whispers to Stiles. He laughs, loud and sharp and wrenchingly, like the sound of a glass dish smashing against the kitchen floor, and Lydia feels like she's drowning. She's unsurprised when Derek takes her home and she finds a familiar book of poetry in his car.

She knew how they would end from the very first moment she saw them touch. She tells herself she couldn't have done anything to stop it. She throws up upon returning home that night, the bullet Derek had dug out of the tree behind where Stiles had been standing hidden in her pocket. She hands it to Stiles the next day and says, "I wish you wouldn't." He smiles the first true smile she's seen from him in months.

She can't look away from the flaking, breaking of his heart, so why even bother trying anymore?


End file.
